As a couture house, Valentino aspires to perfection through the completion of an incontrovertibly finished garment built to the whim and want of its customer. And conventionally, for something to be finished it must look finished, with all the innards of its construction tucked out of sight. Yet what about when that construction has beauty too? And what if being able to see it adds to the experience of inhabiting it?
This, clumsily outlined, was the thought process behind a Valentino menswear collection that Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli said today was first catalyzed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.” Spanning a catalog of artists running from Rembrandt to Rauschenberg and beyond, it displayed works left incomplete, or, in some cases, at least seemingly so. Some were studies, others discarded projects, and a few more non finito: works whose authors had left elements of the skeleton visible to highlight the contrast with the flesh.
“We were very impressed by this exhibition,” said Piccioli: “The works in it allowed you to see the human process behind the conversation between the artist and the viewer.”
Thus, many of the pieces in this collection were non finito too. Perhaps the most striking decorative flourish that Chiuri and Piccioli unpicked was the magisterially tailed roaring panther design taken from a 1967 Valentino couture silk used in an evening dress currently in the collection of the Chicago History Museum. While the original had rhinestone eyes on a dress that was perfectly finished, here it was the rough-around-the-edges visual metaphor for the practice of the whole collection. So on the back and front of cotton field jackets the panther was expressed in an un-inserted intarsia whose edges were left raw and tufted. He snarled at the shoulders of collegiate jackets but was left beheaded. Other non finito elements included the pins left shinily peeking from the unvarnished leather fold of welts on black derby shoes, the irregular fringe of yarn left trailing at the hem and in the body of ribbed, sometimes camouflage, knits. The necklines on smooth bibbed cotton shirts otherwise peppered by broderie anglaise perforations were left collarless and undone. Camouflage was reduced from its conventional five layers of color (plus base fabric) to three.
The irony was that from afar these details were hard to appreciate in a collection that at first sight and without the great privilege of the designers’ preamble appeared almost uniform. You had to look close to see the variation in what was presented as repetition. That added up to an astute rationale for a collection that also featured a lot of customization details available to the customer—monogramming on felt wool cashmere embroidered overcoats, field jackets, and parkas. The collection reflected the habit of man to inhabit the familiar, or as Chiuri put it: “Man is very close to the idea of uniform. Modern uniform in which you represent yourself. Your personal idea. But we really believe that our man is also modern, also clever, also something not regular.” The radical proposition here was not some awkwardly wrought Big Suit whose otherness wheedled needily for attention, but apparently military-industrial clothes whose handcrafted semi-deconstruction signaled their otherness only to those with the eye to see it. This was post-modern luxury mufti par excellence.
